My wife played that game for longer than I’ve played most games, and she only ever played it with a controller. She also liked Littlewood, Disney Dreamlight Valley, and Cozy Grove; she only ever used a controller for them.

I am looking at metacritic, and your MK9 critic score does not match what I see. Here is the PS3 version of MK9 (84), and here is the Xbox 360 version (86). Did you dig up the score for the PC version that I’m having a hard time even finding on their site? Back when we were in that weird period where console developers were way worse at making PC versions? The 360 version of just about any third party game was the main event back then.

User scores are a non-factor to me, as anyone with any petty grievance can and will just leave a laughably low score, and you’re going to see larger swings for high profile games; definitely more for games that launched in the 7th gen and later, when metacritic was a site that entered the public consciousness. The newer games just plain sold more copies than the older ones, largely on the back of reviewing better than the PS2 era. And MK vs. DCU was MK8, if you’re counting how they arrived at 9, 10, and 11 (Shaolin Monks would be a spin-off), so there wasn’t really a large gap there.

It used to be quite common for game dev studios to be multi project, as it kept up a steady cadence of releases, kept multiple disciplines of development work busy in a pipeline, and provided redundancy against any one project failing. Now when it happens with a studio this size, people don’t believe it can work.

It is not. They’re still working on Star Wars.

The competitive piece is one aspect, they could try new game modes that are not just reskins and points like MK Karting, Chess, Konquest, etc.

They still deliver this. Not those modes exactly, but they’ve always had modes beyond the competitive multiplayer. Their marquis feature at this point, and likely the reason MK games are some of the best selling games of the year of their release these days, is the story mode, and NRS’s peers keep trying to do something, anything, that comes close. The towers are another major driver, but not for me; I really enjoyed the Krypt in X and 11. Between that, the story mode, and versus play, there was absolutely no question that I got my money’s worth out of the game. Sadly, the Krypt was replaced with Invasions in MK1, but I don’t think it was a popular feature with anyone, so hopefully Invasions will be gone from future games.

The modern games all under perform against the ps2 games on metacritic.

Deadly Alliance through Armageddon: 79, 81, 75

MK9-MK1: 86 (9), 83 (X), 85 (XL), 82 (11), 88 (11 Ultimate), 83 (1)

The one you cited as having fanfare for not being shit was after the PS2 games (and 4 and vs. DC) built a reputation of being shit…I’m not sure how that supports your argument.

The single player release at EOL sounds like spinning up your own local server and connecting to it.

I applaud the dev for having this plan, but talk is cheap, and my interest in this game can’t start until the private server is available. I get that you want people to congregate in the official server, but they’ll do that naturally anyway.

In case you care about the things I care about:

What is the end-of-life plan?

Project Rebearth let’s you play on a 1 to 1 replica of planet earth. that is only possible when data gets streamed over the internet, even in a single player mode. This also means that servers need to be maintained, which costs money. I cannot maintain these services until the end of time but since you are buying the game, you have the right to an end-of-life plan so you know what you’re getting into. I have the ambition to keep the official game server live for 3 years. this is roughly up until the year 2029. Depending on the active player base at that time, this may be extended. I plan to allow for custom game servers about a year after the game release. When the official server terminates, you will still be able to connect to full-featured community servers with the game you bought and paid for.

I was watching V for Vendetta, a movie about how people allow a fascist government to replace a democracy, because it was November 5th, a crucial political date in that story.

There are edge cases. Older ports, notably Total War and Civilization plus a few other edge cases I’ve found, will either crash when trying to talk to each other or refuse to do it. You can likely sidestep all of these issues by just running the Windows version via Proton instead. I believe the problems those ports had were something to do with underlying libraries and how they keep time, but I admit I don’t know for sure.

I know you mentioned this game to me in this community in the last couple of days, and now this update came along and surprised us all. Would you mind confirming if a dedicated server can be spun up for local play only, with no internet? And if so, does the game have bots to fill out a private server?

Dropping the first bit of proper news on Steam since early 2024 after the release of Battlefield 6 is certainly a choice

Not a terrible one. 4 people can play this game for less than the price of one person playing Battlefield 6. You can capture everyone that’s on a budget or can’t play BF6 due to Secure Boot requirements.

Yup, I think so, too. It was too important and influential, and there’s too much of a gap in the market, for that to not happen.

It’s a night and day difference compared to Nvidia.

We’ve got tons of new types of games that have emerged over the years, but they sprout up at different levels of system requirements. The games that need the new hardware are the ones with the largest development budgets.

See, I was way more into the Halo era of shooters that you weren’t as much of a fan of. I’m sure the pendulum will swing back again, but it just hasn’t happened yet. Doom 2016, for instance, was a game I enjoyed, but I was absolutely not looking for more of it by the time I finished it. Metal: Hellsinger was a good twist on Doom’s formula and got me more interested in playing it than Eternal or Dark Ages did. But outside of that, I can’t say I’m too hungry for that kind of shooter. I’m more interested in Phantom Fury than Ion Fury.

Nah, this is about where the last two console cycles would release new hardware. It’s the confluence of a lot of things at work here.

At the very least, the console cycles are a good indicator of when it makes sense to build a new PC.

I like many kinds. Split-screen multiplayer is great; privately hosted servers that work on LAN without a call home are great; both are rare. I know there’s been a resurgence of “boomer shooters” that harken back to the mid to late 90s, and I can appreciate one of those every now and then, but the kind I miss most are the ones that came out of Half-Life, from the late 90s until the 2010s. They typically had a campaign and a deathmatch built out of reused assets from the campaign. Maybe there was co-op to the campaign. Maybe there was capture the flag. Battlefield’s thing is Conquest, and that’s still great. I hunted down a copy of Battlefield 2 and booted up my old copy of Star Wars: Battlefront II (2005) to get my fix lately, lol.

Sure, but for every Under Night, there’s a DNF Duel that comes in well under the likes of MK. Even if the trend line is going down for NRS, it’s still consistently high enough to track, and the era post-MK9 has done better than pre-. MK1 was supposed to be the one they supported long-term, like their competitors do, to hone in on that better game, but it misfired. A misfire for MK is still better financially than Street Fighter or Tekken on most good days, and it can be attributed to many things (only new gen hardware, rushed out the door, no advance beta to work on system mechanics, a total misread of the audience’s interest in kameos, etc.), but this wasn’t the one. Rumor has it Injustice 3 is around the corner, and like the Sonic cycle, fans will hope this is the one where they nail it, but I think people keep hoping that because they’re not far off from being able to do so.

It’s frustrating too, because other than maybe their attitude toward unblockables in their core systems design, they never seem to make the same mistakes twice. I don’t think any WB shakeup has a high chance of improving the NRS situation, but regardless of one, they’d be crazy not to keep a regular release cadence. Their single player and couch multiplayer experiences have been superb, head and shoulders above their competition, for a long time now, and people show up to pay for that. (But I’m grouchy that they replaced the Krypt with the significantly worse Invasions mode.)